In reply to Tycho (msg # 30):

This is a good point, and one that is answered in the LDS church.  We have a modern day prophet who can receive direct revelation from God as to which books should be considered "scriptural canon" or not.  Other religions, or even the Nicean Council, really can't make that claim (even as to the Pope, as far as I know).

So I agree with you as to all other religions but the LDS one.  :)

I have the prophet "Me" and "Me" says that the only books I can trust are Judges, Ruth, and Mark.

I just take it on faith that that's right.

Sure, maybe it wasn't the author of Mathew who made it up, but if it wasn't true, then somebody made it up, and was being deceptive.  And if a deliberate lie made it into the bible, that calls into question other bits of the bible as well.  If someone somewhere along the line was willing to lie about the virgin birth, then probably someone was willing to lie about other stuff, like the resurrection, other miracles, etc.  A deliberate lie by someone makes it hard to trust the other things in the bible, especially the parts you can't test directly yourself, which are the "important parts" for the most part.

Just because someone is a believer does not make them a deceiver.  Whoever first started stating that either (1) had good reason to know it (maybe firsthand knowledge), or (2) took it on faith based on religion or inspiration.  I really don't ascribe anything intentionally deceitful to it...or anything in the Bible.  At worst, there was some manipulation in translations to conform to what had become canonical doctrine to avoid dissension.

Is honesty worse than dissension?

Long ago, we talked about the "Principle of Reserve."  You have to put yourself in the context of the ignorant, illiterate people who lived in those early centuries, and the numerous variations of Christian, Pagan, and Gnostic beliefs.  The Council of Nicea was meant to unite one faith (Catholic meaning "universal") that would avoid all the splintering.  As such, they adopted the writings and so forth that supported their universal beliefs into the canonical Bible, and rejected the rest of the writings as being not as trustworthy.

So even there, I don't think it was deceptive, as much as wanting a unifying book and doing their best to figure out which writings were the most unifying.  What they chose included things like the virgin birth and traditional books that they believed were more reliable.  But does that mean they were 100% true?  Does that mean anyone was being deceptive?  Probably no on both counts.

So, now that we've had all that splintering and stuff, we may as well put it back in!

So the conclusion we're coming to is the Bible, our primary source of information on God, for which literally millions have laid down their lives and for which trillions of hours of labor have been volunteered, is either intentionally deceptive, or grossly unreliable.

And Heath is totally cool with that?

Yep.

Of course not, but making up a story out of whole cloth does make you a deceiver.

For example, if I think you were at the grocery store yesterday, and I tell someone, "I think Heath was at the store yesterday" I'm not deceiving anyone, even if I'm wrong.  On the other hand, if I say "I saw Heath at the store yesterday, and we had a nice conversation, and he bought some bread," but none of that happened, then I am a deceiver.  And I'm still a deceiver, even if I honestly believe that you bought bread at the store yesterday.


OR (3) just made it up because they thought it would make their story more attractive.

I would call (3) absolutely deceptive.  (2) is deceptive if they don't make it clear that they've inferred it rather than that actually have some evidence for it.  (1) would not be deceptive, but doesn't fit into the situation you're describing where Mary wasn't actually a virgin at all.  Also, even you're really charitable and consider (2) not to be deceptive, if Mary wasn't a virgin, it still calls into question all the other things the author "took on faith" in the rest of the book.

Your premise is misleading.  You could say the same thing about Greek or Roman religions.  How many were crucified because of those gods?

But that's not my point at all, and your attempt to demonize me isn't helpful.  You jump to the conclusion that because one misinterpretation of the Bible was made, every person who died for the entire tome is somehow lessened.  The message is as strong, powerful, and true regardless of the virgin issue.  Your complaint is unfair in that regard.

Or are you saying that millions of people died, not for the Bible, but in the sole pursuit of saying that Mary was a virgin?  I think not.

My point is very simple:  whether she was a virgin or not is not my issue.  The interpretation of the particular phrase is only one possible interpretation.  So you cannot say with certainty that that usage "proves" anything, or even that the Bible itself claims she was sexually pure.  It only diminishes the believer to demand that an ambiguous word can only be interpreted one way, or to demand in the face of opposing evidence, that the traditional belief has to be right without exception.

These are the things that lead to invasions, the Crusades, the Spanish Inquisition, etc.  Are you saying that those things should have happened and millions should have been killed based on those misinterpretations of the Bible?  Maybe they didn't always get it right 100% of the time...

There is no point to saying that Jesus was born of a young woman. So was I.

Maybe they felt Mary had to be distinguished from all the 90 year-old women giving birth in the bible?

The translation is "young woman of marrying age," which was used to mean typically someone who was not yet married.

But my point is that the word has an ambiguous definition.  You can't translate it one way definitively.

It was also used throughout the Bible, even when there was not a definite "point" to that particular word.

In fact, you could read it as not emphasizing Mary but emphasizing Jesus, in that "the young woman will give birth to a Son, and call him Emmanuel."  The focus is not on Mary; it is on Jesus.  So there doesn't really have to be a "point."

This is also an interesting source:

When the New International Translation of the Bible came out in 1978, they had to change "virgin" to "young woman" to be true to the original text.  And by "they," I mean a counsel of bishops, not just laymen.  Here is a quote:

1) I don't think it's misleading. It is the honest conclusion I'm coming away from after reading your posts. I don't mean to be difficult, but if I'm reading you wrong, by only response is 'explain better' (please).

2) From my reading, no one really considered Roman and Greek myths inerrant, and no, not many people were crucified because they were fighting for those religions (I am not aware of any, although Greek martyrs isn't something I've spent a lot of time on). In fact, one of the major distinguishing features of Christianity, which seems to be pretty unique among religions of the time, is how literally true everything was taken. So no, I can't say the same about Greek or Roman religions, and if I could, it doesn't really help your point anyway.




Also not trying to demonize you. Just boiling it down to a salient conclusion. In fact, your attempt to demonize me for perceiving to demonize you is doubly unhelpful :P



I feel like it really isn't, and since this is a qualitative metric, my opinion is wholly valid as a primary piece of evidence.

But more critically, it is quantifiably reducing the strength of the message, and you, as a lawyer, are all too aware of that. The fact that you are even suggesting otherwise is rather baffling. This is the concept of witness reliability.

If you were in court and the witness you're questioning starts talking about how humans originated on the Moon and came to earth in 1914 on spaceships, you know fully well he'd be tossed out on his ear as incompetent.

For most of us, the Bible is our sole witness to the life of Jesus. For you, the Bible is still a primary witness. However, we need to hold the Bible to the same stringent requirements as we might hold any other witness, and if the Bible starts spitting out crazy-talk, even if it's only a *little* crazy-talk, we need to step back and say hey now, this source might not be all that reliable.



I'm okay with that, and I'm not aware of any crusades about that particular issue. Even among Catholics, who have other sources of information to confirm one belief, it's pretty much a "hey, you're wrong according to the catechism, but whatever" type thing. However:

1) It's fun to review the evidence, discuss, etc. So I'm happy to take a position and support it.
2) I'm responding to you in particular because, well, your explanation seems to have much more destructive ramifications for Christians than either of the hypothesis put forward prior.

  So you cannot say with certainty that that usage "proves" anything, or even that the Bible itself claims she was sexually pure.  It only diminishes the believer to demand that an ambiguous word can only be interpreted one way, or to demand in the face of opposing evidence, that the traditional belief has to be right without exception.

These are the things that lead to invasions, the Crusades, the Spanish Inquisition, etc.  Are you saying that those things should have happened and millions should have been killed based on those misinterpretations of the Bible?  Maybe they didn't always get it right 100% of the time...
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I have to say, rereading the article I posted above, it gives more credence to Tycho's idea that Matthew intentionally mistranslated the scripture, assuming everything in the article is accurate.  It was a "retrofitting" of definition, so to speak, since Matthew was trying to convince a Jewish audience that Jesus was the Messiah.  This is why his account is different from that in Luke.

To me, it is very interesting to read these Jewish historical versions because they do not have the pretense of trying to prove that the "virgin" interpretation is the only correct one.

It is possible that Matthew used the Septuagint, where (I'm told; I don't read Greek) the term used is completely ambiguous. He was writing in Greek, so maybe he felt more comfortable reading Greek than reading Hebrew.

Yep, I think everyone gets that. But it sounds like you don't like/understand that for other people it IS an issue, because, as katisara points out, it calls into question the reliability of the 'witness'.  Your focus is on whether it matters to salvation, while others are saying "why would we even believe what that person said about salvation, if we know they've lied about something else to convince us?"  I don't feel like you've really addressed that issue at all yet.


Here I disagree strongly.  The passage is Isaiah is arguably ambiguous (if we're charitable to those who interpret it as meaning "virgin").  The stuff in Matthew is absolutely unambiguous.  There is no question what the intended meaning was in Matthew, and there is no question that Matthew (which is, in fact, in the bible) claims that Mary was a virgin.  You seem to be saying "Isaiah is ambiguous!  It could be either way, and it really doesn't matter which!"  And I could be on board with that.  But Isaiah isn't really the issue, since Isaiah doesn't even actually talk about Jesus.  The issue is Matthew, and whether or not he made up a story about Mary being a virgin, in order to fit his own mis-reading of Isaiah.  Again, whether or not he misread Isaiah could be called a non-issue.  But whether or not he was willing to make up a miracle out of nowhere in order to bolster his case is in fact a pretty key issue when one is trying to determine if you believe all the other stuff he claims.  If you you add in the fact that there are other places in Matthew where the author seems to have changed the story in order to fit dubious misreading of scriptures, his credibility as a witness becomes questionable.  For example, the other gospels talk about Jesus riding into town on a donkey.  But Matthew has him ride into town on two donkeys instead.  Why, because the scripture said that the Messiah would ride in "on a donkey, lo! even the foal of a donkey!" which most people take to mean "not just any donkey, but a donkey foal" where as Matthew took it to mean "two donkeys, one of which is a foal."  You see enough examples like that, and you start to wonder if Matthew is just willing to say whatever he thinks is most likely to get people to believe, without any concern for what actually happened.  And that makes it very hard to believe him when he starts talking about raising from the dead, or Jesus being God, etc.



Again, the passages in Matthew are completely unambiguous.  There is no question about what he meant, only whether he was correct or not.  As for demanding that traditional belief be right without exception, it comes back to the credibility of the story.  It's not that "tradition" has to be correct, but rather that the people making extraordinary claims (eg, Jesus rising from the dead, Jesus being the son of God, Jesus performing miracles) are people you trust enough to take at their word.  And if they're found to have been, not just wrong, but actually making up lies to convince you, that really calls into question whether you should believe what they say about the "big" stuff.

Again, I feel like you haven't addressed this point at all.  You keep only talking about Isaiah being ambiguous, but ignoring the issue of "why should we believe what Matthew says about Jesus, if he's already lied about Jesus' miraculous origins?  If we accept that he's sometimes lies about Jesus, what makes us think he's not lying about him rising from the dead, or being the son of God?"  You keep implying that such questions are unreasonable, but I don't think anyone else here agrees with you on that.  Both myself, as an atheist, and all the believers of various flavours in this discussion, seem to agree that Matthew lying about Jesus' birth would be sort of a big deal.

I think that this is agreed to be the source of the confusion for Matthew.  It's thought he used the Septuagint as a source, rather than the original Hebrew.  So where his mistake/mistranslation of Isaiah is fairly clear and understandable.  The real issue, though, is what he did after having made that mistake.  He made up a whole story of an angel coming down to talk to Mary, and Joseph wanting to divorce her, and yada yada yada, all of which never actually happened (if we're accepting that Mary wasn't a virgin).

So again, to be extra clear, the fact that Matthew made a mistake translating old scriptures isn't a big issue.  I think most people, atheist, christian, or otherwise, wouldn't view that as something that anyone's faith should hinge upon.  What IS a big issue, however, is that he told a story, unambiguously claiming that Mary was in fact a virgin, and which involved conversations with angels, etc.  If that whole story was just made up out of nowhere to fit his mistaken translation, that IS something that calls people's faith into question, because the author of Matthew is one of the key witnesses to the "important stuff," and if he's willing to lie about the little things, why believe him about the big stuff?

You're conflating two different things here (virgin birth, and divine impregnation). Matthew didn't make "up a whole story of an angel coming down to talk to Mary, and Joseph wanting to divorce her, and yada yada yada". He read what he thought was an authoritative source saying that the messiah would be born to a virgin, and saw that it was consistent with what he knew of Jesus' birth. It turns out to be consistent (Jesus was born to a young woman), but not in the strict sense that Matthew thought, and not in a strong enough sense to prove Jesus was the messiah.

Matthew wasn't a liar. He made an honest mistake.

In reply to hakootoko (msg # 53):

So, you're saying that the story of the angel talking to Mary, God impregnating her, etc., really did happen, and Mathew correctly retold it, but he just mis-quoted Isaiah when thinking that story had something to do with OT-prophecies?  I thought the issue we were discussing in this thread was people believing that Mary wasn't a virgin, but still accepting that Jesus was the Messiah.  If you're considering a different possibility (that Mary was a virgin, but Isaiah didn't say she needed to be), that's maybe where we're getting confused with one another.

My position is this:  IF Mary wasn't a virgin, THEN parts of the story in Matthew about an angel telling her she was going to have a baby even though she was a virgin simply didn't happen.  So if you accept that Mary wasn't a virgin, you have to accept that Matthew (or someone else that he copied) made that story up.  He may have done so because he thought "well, Jesus is the Messiah, and the prophecies say the Messiah's mother would be a virgin, so I guess Mary had to be a virgin then!" but to me that doesn't make it a "mistake" rather than a lie.  He still made it up, claiming it to be true when he had no indication that it was true (because, remember, we're starting with the assumption that it wasn't true--if you reject that assumption, the whole discussion is moot).  Also, it's important that he didn't say "well, this must be the case because of what Isaiah said."  Instead he said "this is what happened, and because that matches Isaiah, that means Jesus must be the Messiah."  Even if you're charitable, and assume he "made an honest mistake" by believing that Mary was a virgin based on what he (mis)read in Isaiah, for him to turn around and then use that as "proof" that Jesus was the Messiah in that way would be, in my view, a deliberate lie.

It might be easier to understand what I'm saying with a cartoon example.  Say your friend is accused of a murder.  You've known your friend for years, and just can't imagine he's capable of murder.  So you're convinced he didn't do it.  And because you're convinced of that, you're sure he wasn't at the scene of the crime, and must have been somewhere else when the murder occurred.  If you then tell the cops, "Oh, my friend couldn't have done it, because he wasn't there at the time!  I happen to know he was at his mother's place on the night you say the murder happened!"  that's not an honest mistake.  It's a deliberate falsification of a story to convince someone (the cops in this case) of what you believe but don't know to be true (that your friend is innocent).  You can get in pretty big trouble for doing that (though I'll defer to Heath as to letting using just what trouble it would be), and I think we'd all agree it'd be dishonest and wrong to make up a story, even if you felt really strongly that your friend was innocent.

Likewise with Matthew.  Even if (mis)reading Isaiah made him sure that Mary had to be a virgin, it's still misleading and dishonest of him to make up that story of an angel and such, and then say "see, that matches Isaiah, so you can be sure Jesus is the Messiah!"  There's no "honest mistake" in making up that story.  It might be an honest mistake to say "Isaiah says that the messiah's mother will be a virgin, and Jesus is the Messiah, so it follows that Mary was a virgin."  But That's not what Matthew did.  He said "Isaiah said the Messiah will be born to a virgin.  And Jesus was born to a virgin, so it follows that Jesus is the Messiah."  That's not an honest mistake, and a making up facts to support your case.  And that's dishonest and misleading.  Does that make sense?  I feel like this should be a fairly straight forward idea, but people seem to disagree, so either I'm missing something, or I'm just doing a really poor job of explaining this.

Nope, you're misreading what I wrote (or I didn't make myself clear). My view is:

Matthew believed in the virgin birth from other sources (oral, written, or spiritual), and then found that his version of Isiah said that the messiah would be born to a virgin, so he included it as evidence that Jesus was the messiah. He was wrong about Isiah, and this wasn't evidence that Jesus was the messiah (or very weak evidence, since a great many people are born from young women).

Yes, if you assume Mary wasn't a virgin at the time of Jesus' conception, then someone lied about it. This is a bit rich given that you're usually the one telling people they are assuming what they want to prove :)

I think this is a very likely scenario.  Good summary.

I can accept (from a logical, not religious or spiritual viewpoint) that Matthew was surrounded by crazy stories about Jesus; he was born from a rock, he was born from a man, he was born from a virgin--and when he heard the one that matched his understanding of Isaiah, he said "ah, born from a virgin, you say? Tell me the whole story so I can write it down in my book!" I also wouldn't consider that lying (at least not on Matthew's part).

However, I would consider it gross incompetence.

If Matthew is willing to just quote stuff willy-nilly, it shows:
1) The Bible is not a divine and inerrant source as many people hold it to be true, and in fact an unknown percentage of it is absolute poppycock; and

2) Matthew in specific is an awful witness who claims he sees things that never happened, and thusly ALL testimony from him needs to be tossed out unless it can be corroborated by a second, trustworthy source.

This whole discussion is reminding me of Fozzie Bear's character in Muppet Treasure Island. He honestly believes there's a tiny man living in his finger. Everyone knows he's making stuff up. He is clearly proven unreliable. Yet people keep trusting him with stuff to terrible results, and after the fact they say 'why did we trust him??'

If you're not going to trust Matthew, don't trust Matthew. Otherwise you're doing exactly what he did; trusting a bad source when it agrees with you, which in the end makes YOU the unreliable witness.